HOUSTON, April 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc. (CNI) today
announced the signing of an agreement that provides $l5 million of additional
funding that will enable CNI to make single wall carbon nanotubes (buckytubes)
in sufficient quantities to be used in prototype industrial applications.

The new investors, Gordon Cain and William McMinn, join original
shareholders, Dr. Richard Smalley, Bob Gower, and Drs. Ken Smith and Daniel
Colbert in a venture that is the first in the market with significant
quantities of buckytubes, which can revolutionize the products of numerous
industries. From a base in Houston, Gordon Cain and Bill McMinn have jointly
invested in a wide array of businesses ranging from leveraged buyouts in the
chemical industry to early funding of genome-based companies.

NASA has intense research underway to utilize buckytubes in multiple
aerospace-related applications. NASA envisions uses ranging from vehicle
structures to biomedical sensors. "We expect buckytubes to revolutionize
technologies useful to the space program, possibly opening the frontier by
providing enabling functions that are only dreamed about today. This
commercialization provides the initial steps toward a futuristic reality for
wide-ranging applications," according to Brad Files, nanotube project lead at
Johnson Space Center.

NASA was one of the early funders of the research at Rice University that
led to the formation of CNI. Others have included Texas Advanced Technology
Program, Robert A. Welch Foundation, Office of Naval Research, and National
Science Foundation.

CNI was founded in early 2000 to commercialize technology developed over
the last several years by Dr. Smalley, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry
in 1996 for the discovery of buckyballs. CNI has been granted an exclusive
license for this technology by Rice University, which received an equity
position in CNI.

The new capital will allow CNI to build a test reactor, at its West
Houston headquarters, with about 10 times greater capability than current
equipment. "This reactor will allow us to study process variables and achieve
gas flow rates similar to those in industrial production," said Bob Gower,
President of CNI. The company also plans further scale up of the process by
constructing a pilot plant over the next 12-15 months. This will provide
substantially larger volumes of product into the market, an important
intermediate step before a commercial production facility is built.

CNI will utilize the HiPco(TM) process, a high pressure process using
carbon monoxide as the feedstock, to create high purity buckytubes, single
wall carbon nanotubes that approach molecular perfection. These fullerene
molecules are carbon cylinders only one billionth of a meter in diameter, have
electrical conductivity of copper, thermal conductivity of diamond, and
tensile strength 100 times that of steel.

Until recently, buckytubes had been a laboratory curiosity, with
tremendous promise. CNI is now developing the capability to produce
buckytubes in sufficient quantity for prototypes of end use applications and
expects to have commercial scale production within 3-4 years.

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